K-LIT REVIEW Bora Chung pivots from sci-fi to ghost stories in 'Midnight Timetable'
The cover of Bora Chung's new book translated into English, "Midnight Timetable" / Courtesy of Algonquin Books
The hours after midnight are where emotions — some intense, some that linger for too long — sort themselves out. They mingle with the cold night air and lay resting in shadows and moonlight. Shapes form. You make double-takes. What you thought you saw is actually a manifestation of what you feel, strange and ghostly in the odd hours. This zone of time is when the sinister reveals itself to you.
“I read somewhere that no matter how many hours one sleeps in a day, a normal person has to be asleep at some point between 1 and 3 a.m.,” Bora Chung writes in “Midnight Timetable,” her latest book to be translated into English. “They do say the time between 1 and 3 a.m. are when ghost sightings are the most common. Maybe a lack of sleep during those hours makes people see things.”
Chung has presented the weird and wonderful through short story collections like “Cursed Bunny” and “Your Utopia,” and she returns to these same charms with “Midnight Timetable,” a series of ghost stories that congeal into the form of a novel.
With “Midnight Timetable,” translated by Anton Hur, the paranormal invites you to sit close to a sunbae (a senior) who relays ghost stories to the narrator, the newest employee of the Institute, a hotspot for paranormal activity. We get stories of haunted handkerchiefs and animal corpses. Sheep all covered in surgical wounds, roam around, carrying the weight of abuse and murder. A green-eyed cat nailed to death is pinned with the spirit of a woman who died wrongfully. As the eldest employee, sunbae is a container of many stories, relaying them with a tone so conversational that we feel we’re almost right next to her. But sunbae makes for an interesting storyteller because she is visually impaired. For most of us, seeing is believing, but here, belief is a form of perception that unearths the real horrors from the unsettling undercurrent that runs throughout the stories.
Though we encounter killings and disappearing stairwells and visits from the undead, we find that the true source of horror is rooted in the living: misogyny, extreme evangelical ideals, capitalism. Though we are tired of these buzzwords and their overuse, they strike through these stories like lightning, demanding to be sounded out, seen, believed.
“What we can see and hear and touch in this world is very limited,” sunbae shares. “And so perhaps it’s true we don’t know much about the world at all. We like to say there’s nothing new under the sun, but we don’t have the slightest inkling of how many things there are, indeed, under the sun.”
Chung fills the ghostly voids with social commentary, making omens out of them to help us realize the brittle seams of reality and our actions within it. And as the injustice in each short story unfolds, they form the shape of the novel, revealing the horrors of life with prescient urgency. Omens, however they choose to invite us into their lives, are neither good nor bad, but offer us quick shifts in time to differentiate between then and now — and what now will become.
Chung gave a book talk on Nov. 15 on the rooftop of dbBOOKS’ warehouse to celebrate the English release of “Midnight Timetable.” During the question period, I got the chance to ask her if she believed in ghosts and if she had a ghost story of her own. She said she believed in ghosts, but has never encountered one, and hopes not to.
She also explained that the title of the novel comes from the schedule for night buses that hangs over the ticket window at the station in Pohang, North Gyeongsang Province, where she lives. Such a timetable seemingly helps organize liminal space for liminal beings.
If you’re too afraid to remain awake during the odd hours where these liminal beings lurk, then reading “Midnight Timetable” is like looking into the window of a world unseen, hidden and full of mystery, yet a clear lens into the world you live in.
“Midnight Timetable” is available for purchase through dbbooks.com.
Hailing from Los Angeles, Nathan Truong is currently based in Seoul, where he reads too many books, watches too many movies and drinks way too much coffee. You can find him at @nathansnook on YouTube.